chaemonn

Iris Chang was the author of three books, including the blockbuster The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII. Kamen, also an accomplished journalist and author of four books, was first Iris's rival at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana and then, for many years, an admiring and close friend. Kamen's is a book by a writer about a writer, or rather, the biography of a rich and evolving writerly friendship with a violent end, for Iris Chang was found shot to death in a car by the side of the road near her home in northern California. Chang was then working on a book about the Bataan Death March, and as she had a small son, a happy marriage, and blazingly successly career, many people found it easy to believe she had been murdered, though, as Kamen explains at length, Chang's life was not what it appeared. Kamen's is a deeply moving book that should be read by anyone who is or would be a writer; it's a terrible lesson in the dangers of unbalanced ambition and, at the same time, ironically, the advantages of unbounded ambition. Beautifully written and researched, this is a work to be savored, both on the page, and in many meditations afterwards. I know I will be rereading this one.

2022-11-14 18:50